In Oklahoma this November, this spring’s teacher uprising poured a Blue Wave directly into a glass half full for educators.
Though Democratic gubernatorial candidate Drew Edmondson’s loss to Republican newcomer Kevin Stitt prompted Oklahoma press to dub the November election a “disappointment” for teachers, the story is more complicated.
Oklahoma’s teacher revolt was a direct response to extreme, ideologically-driven tax cuts, which began under a Democratic governor and were pushed past the tipping point by a Republican governor and legislature. It was also a backlash against the corporate school reform movement imposed by both Democratic and Republican non-educators.
One moderate Republican representing the Oklahoma City exurbs, Chris Kannady, was featured in the New York TImes for orchestrating an internal campaign during the primary election to “purge” conservative Republicans who fought against the teacher pay raise. Kannady said the move was necessary to “cut out the cancer that was attacking us.”
Even where electing a Democrat was impossible, the issue of education lead a change.
Although the general election did not reproduce the unprecedented gains of the post-school walkout primaries and runoffs, the Tulsa World reported that the Oklahoma Education Caucus “more than doubled in the Legislature”—growing from nine members to twenty-five or twenty-six. In fact, there was a near-tripling of the caucus if new electeds who are former educators or who got their starts as education advocates and child mentors are included in the count.
The Oklahoma City area best illustrates the successes sparked by the teacher revolt. There are plenty of gerrymandered districts on the outskirts of the city, where it would seem impossible to elect a Democrat or even a supporter of public education, but even there education is leading a change.
In November, a previously Republican stronghold in Oklahoma City elected four progressive Democratic women. This included a state senator, a state representative, a county commissioner, and—in perhaps the nation’s biggest Congressional upset—Democrat Kendra Horn defeated incumbent Republican and automatic weapons manufacturer Steve Russell for a seat in the U.S. House.
In the city’s predominantly African-American districts, where Democrats have long dominated, no champions of charter schools or Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children remain in office. And across the state, twelve new women, disproportionately progressive Democrats, were elected to the state legislature. Oklahoma had previously been second-to-last among states in female representation in its own legislature. Now, as the local Journal Record reports, more than 20 percent of Oklahoma state lawmakers will be women.
And there is an unprecedented number of legislators who now have experience in the inner city. As Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association Vice President Shawna Mott-Wright told the Tulsa World, “You now have more people in the Capitol who actually know what it is like to teach in a public school, to be in the trenches day in and day out . . . I’m talking about recently, not a hundred years ago.”
I repeatedly heard Republicans articulate the same narrative I hear from Democrats. Rightwing ideologues had made governance impossible.
One of the gerrymandered exurban districts recently elected Democrat Jacob Rosecrants, for example, who taught in the inner city school where I taught, the lowest-performing secondary school in the state.
Another exurban district elected Republican Sherrie Conley, a principal who worked in one of the urban district’s most challenging schools in a census tract characterized as having “extreme poverty.” Two other newly elected suburban and exurban state House members include Tammy West, a former PTA leader and school board member, and Rhonda Baker, a former teacher, who have both provided excellent leadership in guiding interim legislative studies on reality-based school improvement approaches. New teacher-legislators Carri Hicks, Mary Boren, and John Waldron; school volunteer Andy Fugate; and other newly-elected education supporters like Julia Kirt and Chelsey Branham will likely join in developing more holistic education policies.
It’s clear that the teacher resistance contributed to a bipartisan sea change in Oklahoma governance. What will be the results for education and overall social welfare? The remaining four legislators who voted against the teacher pay raise and survived the state primary election are still in office. However, all but those four are now gone. And few legislators remain from a decade ago, when Oklahoma joined most of the nation in passing the full corporate reform agenda in a failed attempt to receive federal Race to the Top funding.
I have just returned from a bipartisan forum where I had conversations with a range of current and former Republican state legislators. As former Representative Weldon Watson explains it, the state constitutional amendment passed in the wake of the last major education funding increase in 1992 requires a 75 percent majority to raise taxes. He tells me it took a “miracle” to fund the pay raise.
I repeatedly heard Republicans articulate the same narrative I hear from Democrats. Rightwing ideologues had made governance impossible. Due to both the revolt of teachers and the populist rejection of political insiders, seventy-five percent of the new legislature will have little or no lawmaking experience. It’s as good a time as any for legislators to learn from the ordeal of the last few years. While Governor-elect Stitt seems like an inveterate Trump true believer, the new legislature, which teachers helped to shape, may be open to a new era of bipartisanship.